The Red Word

By Sarah Henstra

The battle of the sexes goes to college in this smart, thrilling debut by university English professor Sarah Henstra. University student Karen is swept up in back-to-school revelry and when she wakes up after a frat party lying on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in anti-frat activism on campus. GBC (‘Gang Bang Central’) is especially notorious, she learns, with several names featured on a list of date rapists compiled by female students.

Despite continuing to party at GBC and even dating one of the brothers, Karen is seduced by the intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women. As Karen finds herself caught between two increasingly polarized camps, her feminist housemates believe they have hit on the perfect way to expose and bring down the fraternity as a symbol of rape culture… but the war between the houses will exact a terrible price.

The Red Word offers a lyrical yet eyes-wide-open account of the epic clash between fraternities’ time-honoured ‘right to party’ and young women’s demands for sexual safety and respect. With strains of The Marriage Plot and reminiscent of the work of Zadie Smith, Donna Tartt and Tom Wolfe, The Red Word arrives on the wings of furies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tramp Press
• Release date: Mar 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781916434226

Sarah Henstra

Sarah Henstra is an Associate Professor of English literature at Ryerson University. She is the author of Mad Miss Mimic, an historical tale for young adults, and We Contain Multitudes, slated for publication in 2019. The Red Word is her first work of adult fiction. Sarah lives in Toronto, Canada.

Reviews for The Red Word

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a great read! A difficult one, often, with some flaws, but this book tells a brutally honest story and is well written. Karen is a Canadian attending university in the U.S. She's dating a "frat boy" and living in a house with four lesbians who are committed feminists. We watch Karen as she straddles both worlds and as she tries to determine her own truth, her own version of reality. The plot evolves as the roommates decide to tackle the rape culture rampant in the fraternities -- a culture condoned by the university administration. This places not only Karen, but other women in a dangerous situation. As Karen asks, do the right people suffer the consequences of the roommates' actions? Where is the trade-off between truth and justice? These are the powerful issues that make the book such a compelling read, even though the characters (except Karen) all seem almost two-dimensional in their unwavering way of seeing the world. I am anxious to read more by this author.

[miss.mesmerized · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For a conference, Karen returns to the town she attended college many years before. It is not a pleasant return since the place is connected to sad memories. Going back there brings it all again to her mind. Her roommates, nice girls at first, whose plan got completely wrong. Her then boy-friend and his fraternity GBC who always treated her nicely but also had another, darker side. The teacher they all admired in their gender studies classes. And the scandal that shock the whole town.Sarah Henstra’s novel tells different tales with only one story. First of all, we have the strong protagonist Karen who as a Canadian always stands a bit outside her fellow students’ circles. She doesn’t have the same background; neither does she have the rich parents who provide her with all she needs not does she come with the intellectual package that most of the others seem to possess. The need to earn money to support herself keeps her from leading the same life as they do. This also brings her into the special situation between the groups who soon find themselves at war.The central topic, however, is how college students deal with sex. On the one hand, we have the partying during which much alcohol and all kinds of drugs are consumed which makes the young people reckless and careless. On the other hand, we have the planned drugging of young women with Rohypnol to abused them. There is a third perspective, represented by the academic intelligentsia: the classic image of the woman as victim, portrayed in history and literature throughout the centuries and which did not change in more than two thousand years.“The Red Word” could hardly be more relevant and up-to-date in the discussions we have seen all over the word about male dominance and indiscriminate abuse of their stronger position. Sarah Henstra does not just foreshadow what happens at the student houses, she openly talks about the rape that happens there. And she does provide a credible picture of what happens afterwards, of how women are accused of having contributed or even asked for it, of lame excuses for the male behaviour and of the psychological effect these experiences have on the students – both, male and female. It is not just black and white, there are many shadows and motives behind their actions, Henstra integrates them convincingly. A felicitous novel with a very important story to tell.